By Tiernan Ray

Cisco Systems (CSCO) this evening published what it calls its “Annual Mobile Visual Networking Index,” a gaggle of facts and figures about how mobile phone and tablet and other wireless devices’ usage of data is changing and a projection for how it will change five years out.

This year’s index posits that last year’s average monthly data consumption, worldwide, of all mobile devices, of 900 petabytes (1,000 trillion bytes) will rise 13-fold between 2012 and 2017, to 11.2 “exabytes,” which is 10 to the power of 18, or one-thousand petabytes. On an annual basis, says Cisco, that would equal 134 exabytes, which would be the equivalent of 134 times all the traffic generated in calendar 2000.

That amounts to 66% growth, compounded annually, per annum. Asia-Pacific will lead growth, however, rising 17 times to 5.3 exabytes by 2017.

On a more relatable scale, whereas the average mobile user consumed 201 megabytes of data per month in 2012, by 2017 they will consume 2 gigabytes per month.

In North America, that figure will be more like 6 gigabytes per month, versus 1.8 gigs per month in Asia and 990 megabytes a month in Africa and the Middle East.

There will be 5.2 billion global mobile users worldwide by 2017, up from just 4.3 billion last year. If that doesn’t sound like a big jump, consider that the compounded annual growth rate in that time of 4% is 3.5 times the rate of population growth, according to Cisco. All those users will work with 10.3 billion devices of a mobile sort, up from 7 billion in 2012.

More important to us mortals, our average connection speed worldwide will rise to 3.9 million bits per second from just half a megabyte last year. In fortunate developed markets like the U.S., we’ll see a rise from 2.6 million bytes per second to 14.4 million bytes, on average.

What will we be using? Of the total 10.3 billion devices in use, 27% will be smartphones, while just 2.3% will be tablet computers, about the same as the level of laptop computers. Fully 50% of the devices will be what Cisco classes as “non-smartphones,” these are things such as older cell phones, which will actually be in decline in every region of the world. As a percentage of devices in use, they will be down from 75% last year.

What Cisco calls machine-to-machine (M2M) communications will surge from 5% last year to 17% by 2017.

Smartphones are expected to generate more mobile data traffic than all laptops, combined, for the first time as soon as this year, Cisco says. And by 2017, they will generate 8.5 times as much traffic as all devices, combined, generated in 2012.

Perhaps the most immediate impact that’s of interest from a business perspective is that tiered pricing plans for cellular usage, which have replaced all-you-can-eat data consumption among many carriers, have succeeded in curbing the data use of the most aggressive subscribers, while expanding the use of the 99%, according to Cisco’s research.

The company finds that the top 1% of subscribers’ contribution to total data traffic, on a monthly basis, has dropped from 52% in January of 2010 to just 16% as of September of last year.

As a consequence, the firm predicts that by 2017, 24% of all mobile data users will generate more than 2 gigabytes of traffic per month, a big jump from the 2% of global mobile users who do so today.

Correction: A prior version of this post carried a headline attributing Cisco’s projections to 2013 when in fact they pertain to 2017. The prior version also incorrectly described “non-smartphones.” They are traditional cell phones, as opposed to “machine-to-machine” communications, which Cisco refers to as “M2M.” My apologies for any confusion caused by the errors.

About Tech Trader Daily

Tech Trader Daily is a blog on technology investing written by Barron’s veteran Tiernan Ray. The blog provides news, analysis and original reporting on events important to investors in software, hardware, the Internet, telecommunications and related fields. Comments and tips can be sent to: techtraderdaily@barrons.com.